In human-machine collaboration, automated machines may assist operators in a variety of ways. However, chaotic assistance may lead to negative consequences, which makes the achievement of effective coordination of the different types of assistance all the more important. This paper discusses the classification of assistance on a cognitive basis and a method of coordinating assistance. Cognitive as...
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In this paper, we present some results from the study on the impedance characteristics of a human arm during the execution of vehicle steering control tasks by using a joystick-type steering device. We propose a new model of human-machine interaction where the damping coefficient of the interface device can be tuned to match the impedance characteristics of the human arm. To verify the proposed mo...
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Estimation of joint torque is an important objective in the analyses of human motion. In particular, many applications seek to discern torque during a desired human motion, which is equivalent to solving the inverse dynamics. The computed torque method is a conventional means of calculating inverse dynamics. The obtained torque, however, invariably includes errors resulting from inexact inertial a...
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An electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) is a common business information space populated with many entities of different system types. Each of them has its own context of how to process activities. This leads to heterogeneous e-marketplace activities, which are difficult to make interoperable and inferred from one entity to another. This study solves this problem by proposing a concept of separa...
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In the intelligence community, the existence of a malicious insider poses a severe threat to information, to the actual analytic process, and, ultimately, to any decision-making process relying on such information and analyses. An analyst with malicious intent can create irreversible short-term, as well as long-term, damage that is hard to detect. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology that...
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This paper addresses a leader-following consensus problem of a multiagent system with switching jointly reachable interconnection and noncoupling time delays. This problem arises naturally in real multiagent systems such as distributed sensing and collective motion. Neighbor-based rules are designed to realize controlling strategies for these agents described by double integrators. Although the in...
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As intermodal hubs connecting barge, train, and truck transportation modes, inland ports play an important role in U.S. and global commerce. Like coastal ports, inland ports face the risk of malevolent attacks, man-made accidents, and natural disasters. However, most port impact studies focus on the consequences of one of these disruptive events suddenly closing a coastal port. This paper examines...
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This paper focuses on residual generation for model-based fault diagnosis. Specifically, a methodology to derive residual generators when nonlinear equations are present in the model is developed. A main result is the characterization of computation sequences that are particularly easy to implement as residual generators and that take causal information into account. An efficient algorithm, based ...
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Two approaches for extending a quantitative Bayesian network (BN) to deal with qualitative information include a qualitative probability network extension and causal independence. Both approaches help developers to remedy the gap between the complicated BN formalism and the actual problem. Lucas utilizes these two methods in establishing a theory of qualitative causal (QC) interaction patterns whe...
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In automated manufacturing systems (AMSs), Petri nets are widely adopted to solve supervisory control problems. Among them, how to enforce liveness and fairness for AMS constitutes an important problem. Enforcing liveness avoids the occurrence of deadlock situations to inhibit the emergence of partial or complete blockness for processing jobs in AMS. Fairness requires the determination of a reason...
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Deadlock prevention, deadlock detection, and deadlock avoidance strategies are used to solve the deadlock problems of flexible manufacturing systems. The theory of regions is recognized as the unique method for obtaining maximally permissive (i.e., optimal) controllers in the existing literature. All legal and live maximal behavior of a Petri net model can be preserved by using a marking/transitio...
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This paper deals with diagnosis of permanent and operational faults of partially observed discrete event systems modeled by interpreted Petri nets capturing both normal and faulty behaviors. Two main results are presented: a structural characterization of the diagnosability property and a method for designing reduced model diagnosers for online fault detection and location. Sufficient conditions f...
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This paper proposes a new criterion, called absolute transparency, to design control schemes applied to bilateral teleoperation of mobile robots with time-varying delay. The absolute transparency measures how and how fast the human operator and the remote system interact with each other through a teleoperation system. The absolute transparency of different control schemes is analyzed and tested th...
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Palmprints have been widely studied for personal authentication because they are highly accurate and incur low costs. Most of the previous work has focused on two-dimensional (2-D) palmprint identification. However, the inner surfaces of palms contain not only texture information but also shape information. Unfortunately, 2-D palmprint systems lose the shape information when capturing palmprint im...
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We develop a generalized block replacement model for a k-out-of-n system and determine the optimum policies of both the threshold level for the number of failed components to prevent system failures and the maintenance cycle that minimizes the expected total system cost. To overcome the existing block replacement policies' drawbacks, i.e., it is rather wasteful if a preventive replac...
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A hybrid algorithm of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and local search (LS) is proposed to solve the redundancy allocation problem for series-parallel multi-state systems. The proposed hybrid algorithm is able to design the system structure with a minimum cost to provide a desired level of availability. Unlike most of the previous studies that only consider homogeneous redundancy, the proposed a...
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Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been recently adopted to solve constrained optimization problems. In this paper, a cultural-based constrained PSO is proposed to incorporate the information of the objective function and constraint violation into four sections of the belief space, specifically normative knowledge, spatial knowledge, situational knowledge, and temporal knowledge. The archived i...
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Many-to-Many (M-M) role transfers are generalized problems that are encountered in collaboration. Exhaustive-search-based algorithms are too computationally intensive. This paper introduces the Kuhn-Munkres (or Hungarian) algorithm for the general assignment problems (GAPs) and proposes a new efficient algorithm to solve the M-M role transfer problems by converting them to the GAPs. The experiment...
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This study is oriented to a general problem context for most manufacturers that produce products for uncertain market demands. Manufacturers usually have two alternative modes for the production: One is to outsource parts from outside suppliers and then assemble them, and the other is to in-house manufacture parts and then assemble them. Each mode has its relative merits. This paper studies how to...
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Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is considered as the de facto standard for Web service composition. To analyze the performance of composite service processes specified in BPEL gives the way to tell whether the process meets the performance requirements. In this paper, we propose a translation-based approach for performance analysis of BPEL processes, which employs a general stochastic P...
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A new variant of particle swarm optimization (PSO), named phase angle-encoded and quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (θ-QPSO), is proposed. Six versions of θ-QPSO using different mappings are presented and compared through their application to solve continuous function optimization problems. Several representative benchmark functions are selected as testing functions. The re...
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Aims & Scope

The fields of systems engineering and human machine systems: systems engineering includes efforts that involve issue formulation, issue analysis and modeling, and decision making and issue interpretation at any of the lifecycle phases associated with the definition, development, and implementation of large systems.